Digital Light Projector Shoot-Out

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Like all technology products, projectors are designed by teams of engineers and marketers who have specific ideas of the intended target audience for their wares. This phenomenon of targeting a product towards a particular set of users is known as “market segmentation”.

Unfortunately, as Tom Peters once pointed out, markets don’t buy products. People do. As technology advances, people begin to search for new types of products or use old products in new and different ways. When a product is designed, good design teams think a lot about how a particular item will actually be used. If they hit the “usage model” target square on, then the product sells well.

But what happens when new usage models develop? This is beginning to happen with projectors. The old “usage models” are still valid, but new ones are emerging. One in particular is gaining steam: the multipurpose projector.

Most projectors are either specifically targeted at home, or the office, and vary considerably based on the target. Office projectors output vast amounts of light — as much as 2000 ANSI lumens or more in some cases. They have bells and whistles necessary for office or business use, such as built-in security, audio output, and slots for memory cards.

Home projectors are optimized for image quality — and tend to be targeted towards an elite audience. After all, only the purest of videophiles would shell out nearly $29,000 for a Runco VX-5000C. Even more modestly priced, single chip DLP projectors for the home are often priced well north of $5,000. They’re even called “front projectors”, to distinguish them from “rear projectors”, those massive, crate-like televisions that dominate the living rooms of many TV viewers.

We last took a look at projectors back in April. Since then, we’ve been rethinking some of our assumptions. Back then, we believed that all projectors that might be used in the home should have de-interlacing hardware. In the interim, two trends have caused us to re-think that belief:

Our experiments with HTPCs (home theater PCs) allowed us to connect the PC directly to the projector’s VGA or DVI inputs. The deinterlacing was handled by the graphics card on the HTPC.

Good quality line doublers, with progressive scan outputs, are now built into many consumer DVD players — some of which cost well under $200.

Of course, you need some way to connect to the projector if it doesn’t support component video inputs, but that’s a relatively easy problem to solve, with an Audio Authority 9A62 video converter. The 9A62 converts component video outputs from your home theater system to RGB so you can plug it directly into a PC-style display.

The above two bullet points mean that almost any digital projector can be used for movie viewing. Now, that doesn’t mean that all projectors offer equally good image quality. But at least it opens up some interesting options.

There’s more to using a projector in the home than just movie viewing. We also think these devices need to handle office applications, Internet surfing and gaming too. Once you start using a decent projector, you’ll want the option to do much more than just video.

So when we cast the net to roundup a new set of projectors, we tried to pick products that seemed to offer solid, multipurpose capabilities. A few of the projectors, like the NEC LT240, HP/Compaq MP4800, and InFocus LP70 are marketed as portable business projectors, but we thought they might be strong contenders for home use as well.

The next page details the four products we tested, and our test methodology. You can head directly to each individual review from there, or simply head right to our Conclusions to figure out which is best.

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

ExtremeTech Newsletter

Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.

Email

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.